The Orphanmaster (10 page)

Good Lord, Drummond thought. The orphanmaster wants me for a nursemaid.

I
n London, the queen consort, Catherine of Braganza, had a cold. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, was also ailing (“I see I must take besides keeping myself warm to make myself break wind and go freely to stool before I can be well”). Strange weather for England in 1663: an extremely cold summer, with frost in August, followed by a summery fall.

A decade before, the first Anglo-Dutch war concluded, but the trade rivalry between the Dutch Republic and England was left to fester, so the two countries, though many of their citizens did not yet realize it, were preparing to fight a second round.

At Fontainebleau, Louis XIV displayed his new affection for collars made from the sheared fur of mink, and his mistress Louise de La Vallière debuted the style of pendant necklace that would later bear her name.

The Royal Theatre opened in London’s Drury Lane. Jan Vermeer completed
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher.
Through microscopic examination, Robert Hooke discovered the cellular structure of cork. “Little rooms,” he called the cells. In Japan, an emperor abdicated. The Turks again invaded Austria.

The new world saw its native population decimated by unintentional but extremely effective biological warfare. Newcomers from Europe beheld the land as a great emptiness, confronting their fragile souls equally, it seemed to them, with a bitterness and an invitation. The great sea yawned. The forest primeval towered.

This was Edward Drummond’s reality. He was both like and unlike other men, those puppets who stared mesmerized at shadows on the wall of the world’s cave. He welcomed the mysteries of the new world, as he embraced the sophistication and hot baths of the old. Science saved him. He pursued the new knowledge as though it were a woman.

The travails of life at the court of Charles II had begun to wear on Drummond. He preferred solitary travel. He had lost one wife, Alice, to childbirth, in which the baby died. He was determined never to marry again, until he did, Simone, and lost her to illness, too. He had loved both well
enough, but to his torment found that he could not remember with which of them he shared, one Christmas, a midnight supper of pears and chocolate.

His dispirited years in exile, living in penury with the throneless king, had marked him deeply. Never again could he see the world as a trustworthy place. Alliances shattered, promises faded, love failed. He continued to serve his king and faction not out of any special zeal, but simply because it was what one did. After spending his life as a soldier, if he had any politics left at all, it was the politics of weariness.

Drummond’s status with Charles II depended entirely on his youthful friendship with the king’s younger brother, Henry, who died in 1660, four months after the restoration. Grief over Henry sent Drummond staggering from London on the crown’s business, a second exile.

The king handed him off to his chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, a cowardly good man to match what he once labeled Cromwell, a brave bad one. Clarendon gave Drummond to Lord Mordaunt, and afterward to the spymaster Sir George Downing.

They all agreed this Drummond was a useful man. Intelligent. Got the job done, whatever the job might be.

Edward Acton Drummond. A cavalier in England, a
chevalier
in France, a
ritter
in Germany, a freebooter on the high seas,
persona non grata
in Spain and Rome. Of the royalist faction labeled the Swordsmen, member of the secret society called the Sealed Knot. With Prince Rupert on his naval adventures privateering in Guinea and the West Indies. Lately operating in Switzerland and the Low Countries.

Now, America. His merchant mask in place, ill-fitting and awkward.

“Beneath the stones of the palace,” a Paris courtesan told Drummond once, “there is common garden dirt.”

He was thirty-three, the same age to the day as the restored monarch. He had seen war, massacre, insult, pride, lovers, fanaticism, riches, loss, pleasure, faithlessness. His task, he realized, the only one left to him until his death, was one of discovery.

How does the superior man live in a godless world?

Late at night, when the street lanterns on the parade ground burned down and the moon had begun to set, Martyn Hendrickson slid through
the side door to his mansion’s hearth-room. He removed his big leather belt and set it on the sideboard, where the heavy buckle clanked as it fell. He picked up a small brass bell and rang it.

Though Martyn kept entirely random hours and oftentimes did not return to the big dwelling-house on Market Street for whole stretches of days, he required that a servant always be at the ready when he did. Tonight Myrthe Mueller stood on call, a gawky girl who at the age of fifteen was well nigh Martyn’s own height. His brothers, Adias and Abraham, chose the house servants for Martyn. They liked them ugly and at least in their mid-teens. Fewer problems that way.

All the girls had crushes on handsome Martyn. When she heard his bell, Myrthe rose from a pallet in front of the smoldering fire.

“Good evening, sire,” the sleepy-eyed girl said, with a heavy German accent. She gave a halfhearted curtsy. “May I get you something?”

“Tea,” said Martyn. Tea had barely arrived on Manhattan. Most residents could not afford it. But the Hendrickson family’s merchant ships sailed regularly to East Asia. Martyn could have had a tea party every day if he so chose.

As Hendrickson waited for the kettle to sing, he leaned back in a silk-embroidered chair by the bay window in the spacious new
groot kamer
, an addition to the dwelling-house that looked out on the grounds. A shadow moved in the settlement’s four a.m. stillness. A black cat, crossing the yard toward the fort.

Martyn never asked that the tapers be lit, as he favored the dark. With a grunt, he offered Myrthe his high-topped boots. Kneeling before him, she yanked them off. He stretched out his legs and waggled his toes.

It had been a long, cold night. A long, pleasurable night. Suzy, the drunkest, most slatternly, cackling witch of a whore on the Strand, offered up her services for the measuring of men’s members. Taking on all comers, so to speak. Kees Bayard failed to measure up. The laughter was loud enough to drown out the howl of the wind off the harbor.

The house lay chilly and empty. Martyn’s brothers had not come to town for many months. He did not miss them, as they tended not to amuse him.

Myrthe set the tray in front of Martyn with a steaming cup of tea and
a cone of white sugar. The tea china came from England, a pattern only a gentleman could afford. The sugar, a rich man’s treat as well. Martyn brought back so many of his tastes from Paris. Chocolate, an aphrodisiac that children loved.

“Anything else, sir?”

“Cake?”

Myrthe disappeared through the doorway, but looked back as she went. There sat the master, his dark eyes glittering like his many-jeweled rings. He leaned his head forward on one hand as though he were weary. Myrthe wondered after him, as always. Whether he might be lonely. Whether he might fancy her.

Myrthe readied the master’s cake on a plate. She had cared for two families before the Hendricksons, one in Germany and then, when she lost her parents, one here in New Amsterdam. She found Martyn breathlessly good-looking, with features that were almost delicate, womanly. Those marvelous green eyes of his.

Yet Martyn gave off a disturbing body odor. When he sat at the close-stool in the cubby off the hearth, his
scheisse
could stench up the whole house. Myrthe had the job of emptying his chamber pot, and the man’s excrement showed black as blood sausage.

In Germany, they liked to interpret such things.

“Master, might I inquire about your diet?” she made bold to ask Martyn once, after a particularly loathsome bowel movement appeared in the best chamber pot.

Her master did not take the question well. He appeared not to be accustomed to the German openness about bodily functions. In fact, he directed Myrthe that if she did not like the way his turds looked, she should take them into her mouth and swallow them down herself.

Then he laughed and tugged on her braid, the way he often did. But after that, Myrthe shut up about the motions of her master’s bowels.

Not all dogs take the collar. Not all men accept the strictures of civilized society. And not all New Amsterdam orphans recognized the authority of Aet Visser as their master.

Settlers glimpsed these renegades only occasionally, flitting down
alleyways, prowling the Strand. They filched day-old bread from the bakeries and slit the purses of drunkards exiting the taprooms. Any normal person contemplating a street urchin’s existence would conclude that such ones had two possible paths forward. They would be dead before twenty, or they would grow up to be rogues. The former was much preferable to the latter.

Twelve-year-old Tibb Dunbar was an orphan renegade who lived outside the colony’s authority. At least, Tibb Dunbar was one of his names. He had many. Werner van der Boorsum, when he wished to pass for Dutch. Brian Wilkins, when he wanted to be English. Frederick, Jules, Sven. He was not above dressing as a girl to get away with a crime spree.

“Heya,” he’d say to his street urchin gang, batting his eyelashes and swishing his petticoat. “My name is Prunella.” The gang laughed heartily.

Even dressed in female attire, Tibb always had a red kerchief about his person, tied around his neck or stuffed into an inner pocket, his marker, his signifier, his nose-wiper and meat-sopper.

The townsfolk knew the red-kerchiefed orphan boy as Gypsy Davey, and the
schout
had him registered on the colony rolls (the veracity of which the boy strenuously denied) as Davey Burrows. Preachers stalked him as a heathen, ripe for baptism.

“The Devil will steal your soul, Gypsy Davey,” the churchy ones warned him.

“The Devil best be watching out,” Tibb responded, “that I don’t steal his.”

Most householders hated Tibb and shooed him away whenever they saw him. But a few matrons doted on him. He had regulars—Blandine among them—who left meat pies out on their stoops for him. Ah, Gypsy Davey. Dashing, debonair, even with dirt on his face.

His exact age, his whereabouts whenever he was sought, all particulars of his parentage and how long he had been in the colony remained a mystery. Aet Visser attempted to make arrangements for Gypsy Davey to “go up the river,” to work at the great estate of the Hendrickson family. But the boy slipped the leash.

Tibb didn’t need a goose-feather pillow. Gypsy Davey liked rooftops. Werner van der Boorsum haunted the wharves. Prunella vanished whenever the
schout
turned the corner.

In fine weather—and to Tibb, any weather that didn’t involve a howling blizzard was fine—he slept under a great oak on the east side of the island, beyond the wall. He welcomed all urchins into his gang, which he called the High Streets, after the address of the work yard behind Missy Flamsteed’s taproom, where a boy could always cadge a beer.

Tibb had his partners in crime, their numbers ranging from a handful in winter to a good two dozen in summer. The High Streets lived high. They loved to prank the burghers, slipping straight-pins into the hanging laundry. They ate, swam, slept, stole, laughed, ran, drank, smoked entirely at their leisure. One June day they picked every bloom out of Sacha Imbrock’s flower garden and sold the roses before anyone could catch them at it. Tibb himself had a great taste for pickles, so pickles were always a target.

“Fetch the pickles” became a code-phrase for “let’s get it started.”

The early October blizzard bothered Tibb not at all. But a worry nagged him as he lay on a tattered beaver pelt under his oak, the last remnant of snow melting beneath his body. He chewed a sassafras stick.

Something bad was happening. Well, something bad was always happening, but this was special bad. A beast went abroad in the colony. That didn’t mean anything either, but this beast had a special liking.

Children.

Nobody in the settlement realized it yet, but Tibb Dunbar did.

T
hat their ankles became moistened as they passed through the thick drifts of autumn leaves made no difference to Johanna de Laet and Hans Bontemantel. They felt eager, randy. The freak snow had kept them away from their private glade for a week.

Now they ran off into the forest near the Maiden’s Brook, holding hands. Hannie toted the basket. She had told her mother she would collect morels for supper.

Yet even a growth of
Phallus impudicus
, the common stinkhorn, could not distract their attention from the matter at hand, which was (Hannie reached brazenly into Hans’s trousers) the matter at hand.

“What does that look like?” Hannie teased about the mushroom. “It looks like yours.”

“Except mine’s bigger,” said Hans, laughing.

She laughed, too, and ran away deeper into the woods, toward their private place.

Hannie and Hans slowed and walked solemnly together through groves of oak and birch. He told her he loved her, she said she loved him. There were many private places on the island of Manhattan, out of sight of God and parents.

Hans grabbed Hannie around the waist as they reached the clearing they had visited nearly every day over the summer. He pulled her to him and clutched a handful of her glossy chestnut curls.

“Wait until we get to our place,” she said.

The spot lay beneath a black elm, where the grasses grew long and full. Just like a feather mattress, they always said.

The weather was a little cool. Hannie had a sense of sadness. They would not be able to come here much longer, once the snows began in earnest.

Even as it was, a pretty fall day, she was glad she had brought a woolen blanket in her basket. They would go underneath it, hiding like children. With the difference of having shucked off their clothes.

Hannie lay down, throwing back her arms in an exaggerated posture of repose. Hans did not take his eyes off her, but removed his jacket as he kneeled.